We are addressing the large-scale, pervasive challenge of improving the collective development and application of knowledge through continual improvement.

The purpose of OHS is to support the collective intelligence of an organization, community, or nation.

Supporting, educating, enculturating, building and using the OHS is The Bootstrapping Community. The Bootstrapping Community is both an internal core support group directly under Dr. Engelbart at The Bootstrap Institute, closely cooperating with the main effort at SRI and the people in the participating organizations.

The collective intelligence of an organization is realized through its Capability Infrastructures; the infrastructures through which an organization get things done. It is people in the organization who use the Tool System (of which OHS is to be a critical part), and who operate in the Human System who provide this Capability Infrastructure. It is the augmented people who provide the capability.

The OHS program is not an attempt to create a solution and leave it alone. The primary role of the OHS system and the Bootstrapping Community is to foster continual improvement. To keep improving we need to design evolution into the system of improvement itself: To get maximum return on the investment of improvement we need to use the capability infrastructures to perpetually develop better capability infrastructures, in effect pulling us up by our bootstraps.

The real challenge is to get the evolutionary environment going to keep up the the pervasive (it's occurring everywhere, at every level and with every aspect of the organization) rate (it's happening faster and faster) and scale (it's big) of change.

Large-scale challenges are best served if there are appropriately scaled strategic principles to guide their pursuit. And special value results if the launch plan of a long-term and large-scale strategy produces significant payoff accrual early in the pursuit.

The OHS project will deliver and continue to support & develop the initial OpenSource core software and support the building of improvement communities which will reap the benefit from and contribute to the bootstrapping process of continually building the OHS (code and community) environment.